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Jerusalem Festival of Light and Art The Department of Nocturnal Affairs Tal Yizrael and Caroline Maxwell ....................................................................... Day 1 - June 14, 2011 Installation begins on St. James Street, in the heart of the Armenian Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem. We soon discover that the locals who live in the neighborhood where our installation is scheduled to be, have not been informed of our installation plans. A very angry neighbor says he’s never informed of anything by the city, by the government… it’s because he’s Arab he says, they never respect the residents of this neighborhood. He claims to be the lawyer of the Armenian Quarter. He’s upset with us hanging the 300 pairs of glowing eyes and electrical wires along the wall that his home shares with the street, and he begins to pull down everything we’ve already attached to the wall. Of course, our installation had been carefully planned and approved, months in advance-- by us and the curators and the festival organizers. But somehow, the residents of this street were (understandably) surprised to learn of our plans to set up an office along with 300 glowing eyes and 10 candle-lit icon paintings along their street. Soon, a very diplomatic man from the festival arrived to speak to this man, after Tal had sent distress messages to all the festival organizers, indicating that someone was essentially tearing down our art installation. After a passionate discussion, the man finally agrees to allow us to hang only the electrical wiring on his wall, and only from pre-existing metal piping. Not great for our installation (no possible way to attach all the eyes, as it’s very windy and they must be glued to the wall to avoid blowing around.) Tal chats with him for a while, and suggests he meet me, the artist who has come all the way from the U.S.A. to exhibit on his street. Tal also tells him that I am from Glendale, California, and that my family is Christian, not Jewish. He suddenly becomes very amicable, he tells us about his family in Jerusalem, his family in Glendale, and he even helps us a bit with the installation. Installation is exhausting, but we get most done on day 1. The eyes however, will not glue to the walls. Centuries of dust have created a surface to which no adhesive will stick. About half of the 300 pairs of eyes are left dangling from the pipes along our new friend’s wall— we decide to try to solve this problem the next day. Meanwhile, we managed to get nine metal hooks for hanging paintings drilled into the walls, as well as the electrical wiring run from the main power box on the street, plus a shelf for our digital projector has been installed about 10 feet off the ground on one of the walls. According to the festival’s rules, we (the artists) are not legally allowed to install anything that requires a ladder. For this, we must hire a “height specialist.” We managed to find an art installer who not only could provide his own extra-long ladder, but a large van, and a willingness to help us move all of the large materials and furniture for our installation from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Another added bonus was his excellent recommendations for street food in Jerusalem’s Old City. Our security guard arrives for the night shift— a girl, no more than 19 or 20, who spends the entire time talking and texting on her cell-phone. All of the furniture for our office, plus the crates and suitcases full of installation tools and hardware has been moved into St. James street. The nocturnal-animal icon-paintings have all been hung along the narrow corridor leading towards the Jewish Quarter. The battery-operated candles look far better than we expected, and the gold leaf surrounding the paintings sparkles in the dimly lit street. The appearance of animals, painted like icons and lit with a single candle catches people off-guard. Most comments I overheard were of fascination and surprise with how beautiful they made the street look. Even though they were uncomfortably “Christian” for many a passerby, (overheard multiple times), they were undeniably beautiful with their gold-leaf mirrors against the soft white limestone walls. A barren passageway turned into a hushed chapel, along which people stationed to identify, laugh about or ponder each animal-icon along the way. Day 2 – June 15, 2011 Our first goal for the day is to find some adhesive that will be able to attach the small, round, aluminum boxes that we’ve converted into glowing animal eyes, to the dusty stone walls of St. James Street. The “height specialist” we were setting up with the previous day recommended using porcelain adhesive, pointing out that you could glue an entire sink to a wall with the stuff, and that it would stick to anything. We pick up a bucket of this stuff, and we head back to Jerusalem. Today there is a new urgency to finishing our installation, as the festival opens at dusk. We already missed our opportunity to test the glowing eyes the previous night due to the adhesive problems and the neighbors not allowing us to hang work on their walls. As soon as I’m up the ladder beginning to glue the metal-box-eyes to the wall, an angry Armenian Orthodox priest comes around the corner, saying that we may NOT touch the walls of his church. This of course is the same wall that forms the west side of the corridor that is St. James Street, and the wall I am currently leaning against gluing about 400 eyes to with porcelain adhesive. After a long rant, the priest announces that he is leaving to go out of town for a week, and that when he gets back he wants to see none of our stuff there. He repeats that he is very very angry, and he walks away. As soon as he’s gone, I am back up the ladder gluing eyes on the wall (the festival only lasts a week, and our installation will of course be gone by the time the priest gets back in town!) The porcelain adhesive doesn’t work. The walls are still too dusty, and we need something that will dry VERY fast. Instead the strings of eyes are covered in a sticky white paste, and are falling all over the place. We are running out of time, and this is not looking good. Tal finds a large sheet of black fabric, and begins to attach the eyes to it with hot glue. At least the eyes can easily stick to this surface, and then it can simply be hung on the wall from the pre-existing pipes and hooks, creating minimal impact on the walls of the church and the Armenian Lawyer’s home. Desperate, we decide to go with this idea, even though the black fabric creates a large black rectangle on the beige limestone wall, we are limited to a small rectangular area for our glowing eyes, and worst of all, the wind blows the fabric around making the eyes impossible to see at times. The entire effect of animal eyes appearing to mysteriously hover and glow along the walls of the corridor is completely lost. At this point, I am nearly ready to give up on the eyes. Canceling this part of the exhibition seems like a better option than having such an inferior and sad-looking display. Meanwhile, I discover that one of the battery-powered candles from the icon paintings has already been stolen. Fortunately, we have 2 extras, so I quickly replace it, and hope that it won’t happen again. We’ve hired two art students, Lea and Mayann, to assist us for the festival. Around 5pm, they arrive to help— and within no time, they solve our problem with hanging the eyes on the wall. They suggest gluing the eyes to chicken wire, which can easily be done with hot glue, and then hang the chicken wire on the wall, again, easy to do on the pre-existing pipes and hooks. The wall will be visible through the chicken wire, and the chicken wire will hold its shape and position in the wind. It couldn’t be a more perfect idea, and Lea and Mayann quickly set to work building our new chicken wire and eye structure. Our two security guards for this evening appear to be teenagers, a boy and a girl who spend the entire time crawling all over each other. I offer them a second chair to sit on, but they prefer to share a single chair. They disappear from time to time. The reports… It takes us a while to figure out how to best explain what we are doing to this crowd. The context in which our office is located (an art gallery, a college campus, Santa Monica, Jerusalem, etc.) plays an enormous part in people’s expectations, plus their overall grasp of a conceptual art project like this. People are always curious, but we need to find a short and concise statement we can make to both explain what we’re doing, plus entice them to participate. So far, only a few people seem to really understand what we’re doing. However, those who do get it really love it. We already have a number of dedicated customers who hang out and linger, enthralled with the office and the stories people stop by to tell. These regulars are a couple of Armenian teenagers, a wandering Ukrainian guy, an Israeli photographer, and two American nuns. Not all of the visitors are as cheerfully curious, one ultra-Orthodox Jewish man is very upset that one of our stamps is in Arabic. He walks down the street shouting something about “kill all the Arabs.” One of the strangest questions we received from time to time was “how much does it cost to file a report?” or “do you take credit cards?” While we expect some people to not immediately recognize that that we aren’t a REAL government department… this was completely unexpected. Later that night I discover that the mp3 player has been stolen from the cabinet by the trash cans where our sound piece was installed. One of the security guards was sitting directly across from it, and it was her job to keep an eye on that portion of the installation. Some of us suspect it may have been her who actually stole it, because as soon as we noticed it missing she disappeared. We reported this theft to the festival organizers, and it created a huge stir. The festival head of security threatened to resign, apparently this was the final straw in a list of complaints about the security situation. We close up our office for the night and leave things in the hands of an extremely eager and helpful Belarusian security guard. We realize he’s got an 8 hour overnight shift ahead of him, and he hasn’t brought any food with him. We buy him some coffee and hot bread and wish him a good night. We catch a glimpse of a beautiful lunar eclipse just as we’re leaving for the night. For a moment, Tal, Udi, the security guard, a British couple and a handful of other passersby and I all stood silent in the tiny street to watch the eclipse passing over our heads. Day 3 – June 16, 2011 Mid-day, Tal receives a call from the festival organizers (the curator, to be exact) saying that they’ve decided to close our exhibit down. First he says that it’s because it’s not exactly what they expected, that the effect of the artwork isn’t big enough. This seems strange, because our installation is EXACTLY what was planned in our proposal, and was approved in every detail by this exact same curator. We remind him about the problems we’ve had with the neighbors, that only half of the eyes were able to be installed, and that the security was so bad that some of our pieces were actually stolen. He admits that he hasn’t really seen our installation in person. I insist that he cannot judge this work or its “impact” without even seeing it, and that this decision is based on rumor. I remind him that the work is perhaps more subtle than some of the other light installations in the festival, but it is exactly what we proposed. We insist that they come see it in person, and explain to us specifically what they don’t like. He calls us back 30 minutes later to say that they still have to close us down, but now it is because of security. He says that our installation is spread across too many different areas, and this is hard to patrol. We agree, but we recommend that they just allow us to condense the installation to a smaller area so that only one or two security guards can easily see everything. They agree to this idea, and we get to work de-installing everything and re-installing into a smaller area. The night begins. As we are putting everything up for the second time, the festival security arrives to tell us that they will block off the street right at our exhibit and not allow people to continue down the street past our exhibit. (So they can follow the festival route correctly, presumably) Our street is the main passage into the Jewish Quarter, and now we have nothing but angry people around us, frustrated that their passage to and from their neighborhood is now closed. The next few hours are spent with security guards and local Jewish residents shouting at each other about their rights to go down the street. This is not the best atmosphere for our exhibit, so I ask the young security guard if he could please allow people to walk through and just tell them that if they want to continue along the festival route they will need to turn back. He declined, preferring his more confrontational approach. Fortunately, this security guard’s shift ended after only an hour of his “road-block” duty, and he was replaced with a more relaxed fellow who agreed with my suggestion to actually let people go through if they wish. The atmosphere returned to normal, and we received enthusiastic reports rather than disdainful accusations and questions like “Why are you artists blocking our street?” Day 4 – June 18, 2011 Saturday night. We arrive after the festival has been closed for the Sabbath. The light-up sign from the festival with our information on it is missing, as are two chairs from the office. These were chairs from Tal and Udi’s new apartment, and actually belonged to their landlord. We begin the night with me sitting on a suitcase, and Tal sits on the remains of one of their green chairs that has lost its back since the last day we were there. The reports this evening continue to be great, we’ve discovered how to better explain what we’re doing, and people seem less suspicious and more curious. We have some return customers, often children. We tell people that “we’re collecting stories about nocturnal animals.” More and more Orthodox Jewish families are stopping to report stories. At the end of the night, while we’re loading all of our equipment into the car a few blocks away, Udi says, “Hey, isn’t that our chair?” And we see there is a chair where a security guard is standing. We ask him where he got it from, and he says he doesn’t know. With some discussion, he agrees to let us take the chair. On our next trip to the car, just as we’re loading the final few boxes, Udi says, “Look, there’s the other chair!” The same security guard is walking out of a church, carrying our second missing chair. He says to us, “I wanted a chair, and since you took mine I went into the church to borrow one… and amazingly, they produce the exact same chair you just took away! It’s a miracle!” We beg him for the chair, insisting that it’s ours, but he begs us to let him sit on it, just for tonight. We give in, making him promise to return it to our installation area when he finishes his shift. Day 5 – June 19, 2011 We return to set up our installation around 7pm, and discover that the security guard from the night before has not returned our chair, and instead a different chair is leaning against the wall. We continue with this new chair. The reports go well that night. At the end of the night, as I am packing up everything, stacking up our furniture, and getting ready to cover everything with sheets for the night, two female security guards walk up and begin removing the sheet-covers and pulling two chairs out from our piled up office furniture. I run over, and say “No!” but they act annoyed and proceed to tell me that they need them to sit on. I try to explain that they cannot take them because they’re part of our art installation. They get more annoyed and tell me that they need them to sit on as if I didn’t understand. Of course I don’t understand any Hebrew, and our common English is not great, but it should have been clear that their job is to guard the materials we’ve secured behind the barriers, not to pull it apart and use it. We go back and forth, there is even a brief tug-of-war with the chairs, and finally, Tal arrives and is able to explain everything in Hebrew. They begrudgingly leave, and I proceed to tie the chairs to the other tables and barricades with twine, making it VERY inconvenient to remove anything. We leave hoping everything will remain untouched until the next day. Day 6 – June 20, 2011 We arrive to our spot to find two chairs missing again. Just as I’m about to lose my temper completely, a security guard walks up the street carrying our two chairs. Everything seems to be going smoothly, our set up is complete and we’re ready to go… and then, a tractor towing a wagon piled high with cardboard boxes attempts to turn onto our tiny street. They make it through the first set of arches and up the narrow corridor. Then, they make it around the first corner into the tiny square where our office is set up. They begin to take the second turn down the even narrower corridor that leads down the final stretch of St. James street, when the tractor gets stuck. They begin to back up, and then realize that they won’t be able to continue the direction they’re headed, and they’ll need to turn around completely and go back the way they came. They yell at me to move my stuff out of their way so they can attempt what will probably be a 30-point turn in the middle of the tiny square. I pull the barricade fence back as much as I can, but this isn’t what they had in mind. They run over, and begin hurriedly grabbing and moving our things to the corner of the square. Almost immediately, they drop one of our lamps and break the light bulb. I begin yelling at them in English, and they stop. They resume the 30-point turn with the tractor, nearly knocking over our projector platform that’s bolted into a wall, plus hitting the walls and a window more than a few times. Tal arrives just as they finish and the festival begins again. At the beginning of the evening, there seems to be an unusually slow flow of people through our street. We discover after about an hour of this that the security guards have blocked off the main entrance to St. James street entirely. Tal begins making phone calls to the festival producers to complain, and we learn that there IS actually a reason for this— apparently the Prime Minister is passing through to view the festival. Once the street is re-opened, the flow of people is good. One guy asks me why the animals have halos in the paintings. He’s a very religious man, and he is a little offended by this. I answer that they’re not halos, but the moon. He points out that one painting has two jackals, each with a halo. He asks, “how can you have two moons?” I tell him that in a painting, you can have as many moons as you want. Day 7 – June 21, 2011 The day all the batteries died. Everything went fine, we had four chairs, security was decent, reporting was VERY busy, but most of the candle batteries died, we forgot the mp3 player at Udi’s parent’s house… and after Mayann took a 45 minute bus ride to retrieve it, it only worked for about an hour and a half before the battery died anyway. Day 8 – June 22, 2011 Setting up went smoothly, Lea’s fiancée kept our chairs and table safe overnight at his apartment down the street. We bought new candles and batteries, so we have just enough to start the evening off with a fully-lit installation. It was a very busy night, Tal was typing constantly. One woman tells us she drove up from Tel Aviv. Apparently she visited us on her own a few days ago, but she wanted to bring her kids to our office so they could report too. Our de-installation lasted from about midnight to 3am, everything that hadn’t already been stripped, damaged or stolen was quietly removed and packed into the car. We stayed in Jerusalem that night at Udi’s parents’ house, then drove back to Tel Aviv the next morning, exhausted. |